A lot of maths notes feel like they start on page two. You see a theorem, then a proof, then an example. But mathematics didn’t descend from the heavens in perfect notation. It was made slowly, and often painfully, by people who couldn’t leave a problem alone. So here’s a post on why I think every maths topic should begin with four things: the problem it was invented to solve, the person behind it, the core intuition, and only then, the formal theorem.